[HN Gopher] Google to end the "top stories carousel" benefit to ...
___________________________________________________________________
Google to end the "top stories carousel" benefit to AMP next spring
Author : CPLX
Score : 588 points
Date : 2020-11-19 13:42 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (themarkup.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (themarkup.org)
| Reason077 wrote:
| It would be nice if Google gave an option to disable AMP. I don't
| have any philosophical objection to it, but too often it causes
| rendering glitches and other annoyances on my iPhone. It also
| makes it annoying to copy the link if I want to save it or
| forward it etc. The performance increase is from AMP is pretty
| marginal and not worth all the hassle for me.
| millstone wrote:
| To my knowledge, Google has never explained why they don't
| offer a setting here. Here's someone requesting a way, and
| getting smoke blown back instead:
| https://support.google.com/webmasters/forum/AAAA2Jdx3sU8ogdv...
|
| I guess it's in Google's interest to force AMP.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| Android users can use kiwi browser (chromium) to disable amp
| plus some other cool stuff like extensions. secondly, almost
| all websites provide share button to copy absolute url of that
| webpage.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| When I upvoted this, the story was titled "Publishers may finally
| be able to ditch AMP as Google faces antitrust scrutiny" and
| linked to [1]. Several changes in the title, and now also in the
| posted link is a little bit too much editorializing for my taste.
|
| [1]: https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/11/19/as-
| antitru...
|
| Edit: changed again; for posteriority, the title was "Timing for
| bringing page experience to Google Search" and linked to [2] at
| the time I wrote the above comment.
|
| [2]: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-
| for...
| admax88q wrote:
| Oh wow, I was wondering why everyone was talking about AMP.
| That is a really dramatic change.
| hedora wrote:
| I've noticed stories critical of FAANG often get flagged or
| otherwise mucked with.
|
| Not sure if it's astroturfing, or what. This change is
| particularly egregious.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| This article is mostly based on a quote from
| https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for....
| We changed the URL to that for a while, in keeping with the
| guidelines' call for original sources
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but I think
| that's probably too confusing here. Also, the article does
| include some additional reporting, such as reactions from news
| orgs like NYT.
| [deleted]
| penguinlover2 wrote:
| When I was struck in a developing country in March-April during
| pandemic, I was glad for AMP to minimise data and save costs. I
| am saddend that hn does not recognise the different (poor) parts
| of the world need quick/bloat free websites.
|
| Yes, ideally all webdevs would make the non-AMP page bloat free.
| But as you know many a world pages are horrible and load tons of
| trackers.
|
| Why is there is clear hate - AMP can be used for good and bad.
| UhDev wrote:
| Amp pages aren't websites, they are google content.
| acdha wrote:
| Because what Google is doing now is what they needed years ago:
| punish bloated sites based on real experiences. AMP was an
| attempt to block Facebook news and use search dominance to give
| them control over how publishers use the web.
|
| If it had just been about performance they wouldn't have needed
| so much extra work and they wouldn't have ignored the
| performance and reliability drawbacks to putting so much
| JavaScript into the critical path for page loads. Those 5+
| second AMP mobile page views were completely avoidable if your
| goal was performance rather than control.
| 3np wrote:
| When I read this, I feel more than anything here, Google is
| dictating how any web page should look, behave and be structured
| in order to be considered for display to users. Disregard their
| content/structure/style guidelines and you will be at the bottom
| of the rank.
|
| This is not a new thing (AMP) but it's the first time I realize
| that's exactly what they're doing.
|
| I hate it. Even if I fully agree with their judgments on the
| specifics, this is not healthy for the web.
| bevdecloud wrote:
| What does page experience mean?
| z3t4 wrote:
| I hope they don't use Lighthouse and PageSpeed blindly - as the
| score does not correlate significantly with perceived load time
| and performance, and is also easy to game!
| mmcconnell1618 wrote:
| Have you tried running Lighthouse and PageSpeed on a site that
| serves up Google Ads via AdSense? My site can be optimized like
| crazy but still score low because of Google's javascript ad
| loading code.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Like spending two weeks optimizing site load - from 2 seconds
| to 200ms - and then adding Google and Facebook
| analytics/trackers and you are back to 2+ seconds load time
| again.
| jonplackett wrote:
| The thing I hate most about AMP is how when you want to share the
| page you can't just copy the URL and send to people without it
| being the AMP URL.
|
| I wish apple would create a no-AMP option in Safari and just auto
| redirect to the normal page.
| arn wrote:
| Apple sort of does this on mobile Safari and its a frustrating
| / unexpected experience.
|
| If you are on a website in mobile safari, and you hit the share
| button, and select Copy. What gets copied into the clipboard is
| actually the Canonical url rather than the actual one you are
| at.
|
| So for /amp/ pages, it ends up copying the non-amp url.
|
| imo, it's a bad experience because sometimes canonicals and non
| canonicals aren't exactly the same. For example, if I'm looking
| at a specific filter or sort, then it might make sense for the
| canonical to be the non-sorted version. But if I'm sharing a
| specific url, I want it to share exactly what I'm looking at.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Google's solution to this is to basically build the distributed
| web so that browsers can show the correct origin and URL when
| they hit Google's AMP proxy.
| jonplackett wrote:
| This is even worse. Sometimes now you click to get the real
| URL, and it's still a god damn AMP page.
|
| I hate AMP with a firey passion.
| Spivak wrote:
| I think you've got this backwards. This is "democratized
| CDNs" not "AMP for Everything." Web Bundles are a
| replacement for AMP that's not Google specific.
|
| With Web Bundles the only thing that a cache can do is
| serve you an immutable asset that is signed by the original
| publisher exactly as if you had connected to the origin
| server.
| cletus wrote:
| I am sympathetic to the idea that mobile sites are terrible and
| Google wants to make that less terrible.
|
| But AMP as a solution to that seems to be completely misguided.
| Worse, I suspect the continued push for it demonstrates both a
| lack of leadership and the sort of ego-driven corporate politics
| where no one wants to admit they're wrong so just keep doubling
| down until you win.
|
| AMP still breaks for me on iOS in completely fixable ways. I have
| poor eyesight. I use higher default zoom. I suspect this is the
| reason why AMP rendered content doesn't fit on my screen and I
| can't scroll to the part that doesn't fit. It's super-annoying.
|
| On iOS you can force touch the link to render a preview and get
| the non-AMP version. There's no way to get that by default and
| that is a completely ridiculous situation.
|
| I, as a user, should be able to opt out of this crap.
|
| The fact that Google forced this down people's throats by giving
| AMP content ranking preference is an utterly stupid decision by
| leadership. It risks antitrust action, government investigations
| and all that entails.
|
| If you want to prefer sites that load fast, that's fast. If you
| want to prefer sites that use a technology that you created and
| control that's completely different. This is a textbook example
| of abusing your market power. I'm sure the executives found legal
| advice to the contrary. If so, such advice ignores just how
| malleable government action is and the negative PR consequences.
|
| Reducing that search ranking boost is a step in the right
| direction but it never should've happened in the first place. You
| can't turn back time of course but that ranking boost needs to
| disappear entirely. Immediately.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The article and some of the comments here seem to be over-
| interpreting this change.
|
| This is NOT ending AMP, and I don't know where anyone's getting
| that idea.
|
| It will continue to rank by "page experience signals", and
| presumably AMP pages will continue to be the standard to beat.
|
| In other words, if you can go ahead and replicate AMP's loading
| speed on your own (maybe self-hosted AMP?) then awesome.
|
| I _do_ hope sites do that, because sites loading instantly rather
| than taking 5 seconds is a huge win.
|
| But in practice non-AMP news sites are still filled with bloat
| that makes them take 5 seconds to load.
|
| AMP has massively increased the performance of many news
| publishers forced to switch to AMP. We'll see if publishers are
| now motivated to try to make their native sites equally fast. I'm
| not holding my breath, though. I assume they'll stick with AMP
| because they don't want to re-architect their sites, or don't
| have the technical bandwidth to do so.
|
| But this way Google appears more neutral with "objective" page
| performance measures, rather than explicitly favoring any single
| standard.
|
| EDIT: the URL and title have since been changed by mods to a
| Google blog post. The original article/submission I was referring
| to was: https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/11/19/as-
| antitru...
| driverdan wrote:
| This is exactly how it should be. Let sites use normal web
| standards to create great, fast experiences and rank them on
| their merit.
| criddell wrote:
| Is a great, fast experience compatible with ad supported?
| notriddle wrote:
| LWN and HN both have ads. They just aren't third-party ads.
| eloff wrote:
| This is a smart play by Google now that they're under antitrust
| scrutiny. Instead of abuse their market position by forcing AMP
| down publisher's throats, they can do much the same thing but
| with an appearance of neutrality.
|
| I think most of us here know that 99% of publishers will not be
| able to match AMP in performance, so the incentives haven't
| changed.
|
| I like the change though because this will force everyone to
| pay attention to website performance - something that's often
| an afterthought. We used to be able to use the internet over a
| dial up modem and it was OK, not great, but OK. Now that would
| be nearly impossible.
| rch wrote:
| I've noticed that without the benefit of blockers, pages load
| quickly and then progressively degrade as intrusive assets roll
| in. I hope this change punishes that behavior as well.
| mason55 wrote:
| Yeah I hate AMP on principle but unless I'm really mindful
| about it my brain unconsciously clicks the AMP links because
| the experience is so much better
| tyingq wrote:
| It's ending the biggest incentive to bother using AMP. Over
| enough time there's not much difference from ending AMP.
|
| The article has a quote from the New York Times that suggests
| they will move away.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's not, though. If the fastest pages still get promoted to
| the top, and AMP results in the fastest pages, then the
| incentive remains just as large as before.
|
| And the NYT quote doesn't suggest they'll move away at all.
| It just says it's "important" for Google not to make AMP a
| "requirement".
| lucideer wrote:
| > _If the fastest pages still get promoted to the top, and
| AMP results in the fastest pages, then the incentive
| remains just as large as before._
|
| The first two components of your sentence are conditionals.
| Even _IF_ they 're both true, the very fact that they are
| uncertain, whereas before they were certain, makes the
| incentive MUCH MUCH smaller than before.
|
| Any uncertainty at all will make internal discussions with
| technical leadership on maintaining AMP infrastructure
| weaker in companies like NYT. If they don't drop it
| immediately, there will at least be a ongoing internal
| dialogue about potentially doing so, brought up any time
| bugs need fixing in, or resources need reassigning to, AMP
| infra.
| jjulius wrote:
| >I do hope sites do that, because sites loading instantly
| rather than taking 5 seconds is a huge win.
|
| >But in practice non-AMP news sites are still filled with bloat
| that makes them take 5 seconds to load.
|
| I wish people would stop saying "AMP means pages load
| instantly" as though it's an absolute. My experience with AMP
| pages has been the opposite; increased loading time, or pages
| that often don't even load at all. Come to find out in a HN
| thread from last year[0], AMP pages add an 8-second blank page
| delay if the user disable's Googles third-party js.
|
| [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19919881
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Yeah, AMP sites I get load really fast. But that's not really
| useful when they come without all of the original page
| functionality or don't even show all of the content. That's my
| gripe with AMP pages.
| doomlaser wrote:
| I continually get emails from Google, "Search Console has
| identified that your site is affected by 1 Mobile Usability
| issues: site: Content wider than screen"
|
| The thing is, the software I have on http://doomlaser.com is
| only for desktops. And I just noticed that a direct search for
| one of my apps, Cursorcerer, is now ranked #2 behind an entry
| for it on MacUpdate. A little frustrating. I guess I could
| redesign for mobile, but I would really rather not. Over 90% of
| my traffic is from desktops for a reason. Whatever happened to
| getting "the full Internet, not a mobile Internet" on your
| phone?
| skybrian wrote:
| I wonder if this ranking varies for mobile versus desktop
| users?
| doomlaser wrote:
| Just tried in a private tab on a phone: #1 result on
| mobile, #2 on desktop search. Weird
| lucideer wrote:
| > _This is NOT ending AMP, and I don 't know where anyone's
| getting that idea._
|
| Where the idea might come from would be that many (particularly
| large) websites would have implemented AMP reluctantly, and
| currently incur extra maintenance cost for AMP as part of a
| deliberative ongoing cost-benefit analysis. This removes one of
| the major _obvious_ benefits in that analysis (AMP pages may
| still benefit but it 's harder to qualify), so there may be a
| stronger technical argument within companies to drop support.
|
| > _It will continue to rank by "page experience signals", and
| presumably AMP pages will continue to be the standard to beat._
|
| This is a tricky prospect. A concrete "we will treat your AMP
| page preferentially" is a lot easier for tech managers to grok
| than "AMP stands a good chance of scoring well on metrics we
| prioritise, so may be preferred, if you believe you can't
| achieve these metrics without AMP".
|
| On the flip side, it's completely conceivable that Google could
| continue to treat AMP pages preferentially while claiming it's
| due to proxy metrics, since their algorithms are not public.
| watwut wrote:
| I as a user hope for AMP to die as soon as possible. It is
| annoying to have to edit url on mobile each time to get the
| real version.
| lowdose wrote:
| On most AMP sites it is possible to share the original url
| directly.
| watwut wrote:
| Not to share it. To freaking see it in the first place.
| Amp comes with limited functionality and outdated
| content.
|
| Plus, you loose whatever customizations you turned on
| (dark mode) in web site settings. It is particularly bad
| on reddit.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Isn't that the point, though? I'm more than happy for Google to
| use loading speed as a signal in their search rankings. The
| issue was that sites were penalized for not using AMP _even if
| they had equivalent or better performance_.
|
| If AMP becomes a lower bound for performance and non-AMP sites
| slim down their pages to compete, great. If sites that don't
| compete on performance die off as their search ranking
| decreases... also great!
| koheripbal wrote:
| At first I thought 5 seconds was a long amount of time, and
| then I loaded my company's website and noticed it really does
| take 5 seconds to load. It's a self-hosted Wordpress site on
| the GB business internet in our office.
|
| How can I possibly compete with AMP? I notice that even
| Reddit.com takes about 3 seconds to load. cnn.com, 2 seconds
| snazz wrote:
| Making WordPress fast requires some pretty serious caching
| effort, in my experience. Your internet connection might
| not be quite up to snuff for server hosting either,
| although you can test that with ping and checking the time
| to first byte.
|
| Also, Reddit isn't exactly fast--it takes six seconds to
| load for me. Wikipedia and HN are better examples.
|
| If you want the very lowest bound possible on latency for
| your internet connection, try loading
| https://cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace. That should load in
| milliseconds. From there, you can do a little more
| profiling work on your site.
| ryandrake wrote:
| There are plugins that help automate the easy stuff and
| provide lots of bang for the buck. I took a day a while
| back and got my local gaming league's Wordpress site down
| from something like 6.5 seconds to 0.99 seconds by
| switching hosts, removing heavy plugins, compressing
| images, and lots of caching. Totally doable if you are
| mostly static content (which should be all news sites).
| ramses0 wrote:
| Ahhh, ye olde yslow... http://yslow.org
| criddell wrote:
| Do you know why your site is so slow?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| 1. Static rendering
|
| 2. Use a CDN and size images appropriately
|
| 3. Avoid JS as much as possible, use it only for
| enhancements
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > even if they had equivalent or better performance.
|
| How are you going to achieve equivalent or better performance
| than instant? The whole point of AMP is that it can be safely
| prerendered.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Why can't non-AMP pages be safely prerendered?
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Because doing so would communicate with the publisher's
| web server before the user has clicked on any results,
| deanonymizing the user to the publishers of all the
| results on the page.
|
| This is the entire point of AMP, yet 90% or more of the
| commenters on AMP articles don't understand it, which
| makes the comments completely useless.
| jsnell wrote:
| Or if everyone continues to use AMP because they are not able
| to match the performance, that's also great? :)
|
| The entire AMP design was driven by the need to make same
| origin serving of the content possible in a safe manner. That
| is where the performance gains come from, not from having
| lighter markup. And that is still just as true now as it was
| five years ago.
| tyingq wrote:
| Same origin loading also allowed Google to take over the
| top of your page, hijack swipe actions (to send your
| visitor to a competitor), and so on. Some publishers may
| value moving away from AMP to prevent that sort of thing in
| the future, despite perhaps a small cost in performance.
| acdha wrote:
| The entire AMP design was driven by a desire to put Google
| in charge of publishing, heading off Facebook. Putting 1MB
| of render-blocking JavaScript in the critical path was
| never good for users - just ask the Chrome developers! -
| but it was a strategic play which fortunately failed both
| because it wasn't as fast as claimed and most publishers
| didn't want to cede control of their UX.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Why does the same origin matter? There's no substantive
| difference between my page being served from Google's edge
| network vs. from Cloudflare's or Amazon's.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| AMP pages are bloated compared to browsing with NoScript
| and ads blocked. It isn't hard to deliberately beat AMP
| performance with enough motivation to make it happen. There
| needs to be an upheaval of ad vendors to make self hosted
| images without JS viable.
| egl2020 wrote:
| Caching is part of what makes AMP fast, and publishers may find
| that they also have to run caching servers to get AMP-like
| speeds.
| acdha wrote:
| Publishers have used CDNs since the late 90s. They know.
| sida wrote:
| I hate AMP as a user. It breaks my browsing experience in strange
| and sometimes unexpected ways. (like certain scroll features can
| stop working, sometimes weird features like search in page can
| also break. Sometimes when you try to highlight some text, it
| will highlight a whole section. And the solution is always -->
| click the button to get to the actual page and then it is fine)
| leppr wrote:
| Also, sites often use automatic AMP generators which break
| subtly, fail to load or omit images.
| rodw wrote:
| AMP makes images a PITA [1], often it's much easier to omit
| the image than deal with the extra production cost and
| effort.
|
| [1] https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-img/
| shakezula wrote:
| No to mention it's practically a dark pattern that they push on
| you. I hate how they'll send me to AMP links and then the UX to
| get the original URL I wanted and not some abomination of a
| google amp URL is terrible and they purposefully make it as
| subtle as possible that you're not on the actual domain or site
| that you wanted.
|
| It feels like a benevolent phishing scheme.
| yagya wrote:
| The funny part is that when I tried the latest version on
| Chrome on Android 11 back in September, whenever I clicked on
| an AMP link, it would think Google's AMP domain was a
| phishing site.
| ijidak wrote:
| Same exact experience.
|
| That's why I find it rich that Google groups this under "page
| experience signals".
|
| This is the ugly side of market dominance.
|
| Google is entitled to have the opinion that AMP improves page
| experience.
|
| But without competition, there is no loss of market share to
| give them the "this sucks" signal.
|
| So the world has to wait for Google to degrade to the point
| that a new competitor starts to eat their market share.
| gowld wrote:
| Bing? DDG?
|
| What does the world have to wait for? The world is who
| chooses when a competitor starts to eat their market share.
| amenod wrote:
| + Firefox. I live quite happily without Google (with
| exception of occasional Youtube), thank you very much.
| muzani wrote:
| I've tried both. While it works, it simply doesn't match
| Google's accuracy. So Google will still get away with a lot
| of things.
| eitland wrote:
| In my experience Google is now about as bad as their
| competition was when they broke through: lots of
| irrelevant cruft on every single search, and not just
| spam but completely unrelated pages that doesn't contain
| a single keyword from my search.
|
| DuckDuckGo isn't fabulous either but it is faster to
| retry in Google from DDG than the other way around so it
| is my default search engine now.
|
| I wonder: why is it soooo hard - for both DDG and Google
| to just respect + or "" or the verbatim option in Googles
| case?
|
| Because an empty set is far more valuable to me than a
| rich set of irrelevant results?
|
| (Lately it seems I've been assigned to an experiment that
| has slightly better results and also shows me the context
| they think are relevant in the results page. That helps
| immensely, but of course I have no way to get that to
| stick :-/ )
|
| PS: If anyone wants a billion dollar idea, recreate
| Google from before the DoubleClick acquisition:
| contextual ads, relevant results. Because that spot is
| empty, and given Moores law, the fact that the original
| PageRank patent has expired and more it should cost a
| tenth today vs then. Also Google seems to be collapsing
| under their own weight so there's less chance they manage
| to catch up.
|
| PPS: I'd pay 10USD a month _and accept contextual ads on
| top of that_ to get back something like old Google.
| darepublic wrote:
| Maybe Bing and DDG are not different or better enough?
| torb-xyz wrote:
| My frustrations with AMP (as a user) was originally what pushed
| me to DuckDuckGo. Now I rarely encounter AMP-versions of sites.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| I have been using DDG full time for a month or so now but
| they really need to work on making their search results more
| readable. I might use a browser plug-in to customize the
| styling myself when I get some free time.
| czottmann wrote:
| IIRC, DDG lets you configure fonts, sites and colors for
| results, somewhere in the settings. Works well for me,
| especially in conjunction with their "cloud save" feature.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Yes I wish there was a way to never load amp
| fartcannon wrote:
| Firefox and the Amp to HTML plugin
| propelol wrote:
| I'm using this browser extension to stop AMP:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/nb-NO/firefox/addon/amp2html/
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Here's the same link for English speaking users:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/
| chinhodado wrote:
| I especially hate it for reddit AMP links, since 100% of the
| time I have to click on the original link anyway to read the
| full comments, so it's an extra middle step for no good reason.
| bmn__ wrote:
| https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html
| ryan93 wrote:
| Between Amp, Reddit telling you to open their app and
| expanding comments. It takes three clicks after opening a
| Reddit link to see all the comments.
| O_H_E wrote:
| A good reddit app like Relay or Apollo is a must have for
| me.
| Avery3R wrote:
| old.reddit and i.reddit work pretty well on mobile
| king_magic wrote:
| God I hope this at least reduces AMP. AMP is a cancer on the web.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| I think Core Web Vitals were incorporated into their approach to
| prepare for the retirement of AMP. Pushing publishers towards
| industry-wide best practices is a good thing. Forcing AMP as a
| solution really wasn't.
| achairapart wrote:
| To me AMP was just Google trying to turn the web itself in its
| own walled garden (after many failed social media attempts).
|
| And, as I read in the article, it looks like behind this move
| there is some current "Antitrust Pressure" plus publishers
| quite pissed off about losing both control and revenue
| themselves (as much as 39% less conversions, they says.).
|
| Clearly AMP was way more in Google master plans than a poor web
| performance palliative.
|
| [Edit]
|
| This was the article linked to this story when I commented (now
| changed to some Google Dev docs):
|
| https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/11/19/as-antitru...
| ehsankia wrote:
| I never saw any convincing argument that AMP helped pushed a
| walled garden, at least not in any common accepted sense of
| that term.
|
| It was open source, it was used by many others including
| competitors, it was optional and it didn't block access from
| anyone. Having an AMP version in no way "locked" you to any
| garden, AMP versions aren't even meant to be the canonical
| page anyways.
|
| It may have had a lot of issues, but "walled garden" would
| not be one of them.
| pushrax wrote:
| I always viewed AMP as being primarily for Google's data
| collection interests, not primarily lock-in.
| tyingq wrote:
| The carousel setup it enabled was certainly a (soft) walled
| garden. It hijacked the top portion of a publisher's page,
| the back button, and swipe actions, resulting in more time
| spent on Google.
| achairapart wrote:
| All of the antitrust case is about how Google pushed its
| user searches to its own proprieties.
|
| And it was as optional as publishers were almost forced to
| jump in it to stay relevant in News SEO.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Exactly. Walles garden would be requiring publishers to
| send articles directly to Google if they want to enable
| instant loading (like Apple News). Instead, publishers
| publish their articles publicly in a way that Google's
| competitors can _and do_ consume.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I'm not super happy with the Web Vitals, either. They seem to
| be pushing the Web toward deploying a lot of otherwise-
| unnecessary JavaScript cleverness that ultimately presents
| itself to me in the form of a generally more obnoxious
| experience. Older and non-Chrome browsers may have difficulty
| rendering it. Total bandwidth consumption can go up, because
| it's A-OK to load a bunch of enormous resources later, just as
| long as it doesn't happen on initial page load, or take longer
| than 4 seconds to happen, as measured by the company with the
| fastest Internet connection in the world.
|
| Long story short, I don't see it as best practices that serve
| Internet users as a whole. They seem to be more closely
| tailored to the interests of Google. And, by extension, the
| subset of netizens from which they can generate the most
| revenue.
| conradfr wrote:
| As someone who has tried to improve his PageSpeed Insights
| score for a few days I kind of agree. I also think their
| metrics scores are harsh.
|
| At least they link to a lot of docs and advices.
|
| Also funnily enough they complain about Google Analytics.
| Conlectus wrote:
| The existence of first-contentful-paint, as well as the page
| speed index, would suggest they care to prioritize for these
| factors as well and not simply defer to after load.
|
| Both of those metrics account for the visual completion of
| the page relative to its final appearance -- deferred
| resources would slow that.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| I just looked into the search console for the first time in
| forever, and I'm not sure how Core Web Vitals would be
| pushing for unnecessary JavaScript. A website consisting of
| 100% static content seems to be fully okay according to their
| metrics - but funnily enough, some months ago they claimed
| that 50% of the pages were served too slowly on computers,
| while 100% of pages were OK on mobile. Same static server.
| Now it's the other way around, they randomly say that a
| random selection of pages is too slow on mobile, and it
| changes every day. Maybe it's just _their own_ connection
| that sucks? It also doesn 't help that they keep using
| acronyms for the broken stuff that aren't explained
| everywhere on the page itself.
| falcolas wrote:
| Perhaps the mobile loading time tolerances are larger,
| meaning that if the timings between desktop and mobile are
| largely the same, they could have different results.
| lukebennett wrote:
| Whilst there is an element of lab measurement involved,
| they do use field measurement, so metrics are collated from
| users rather than their own connection. This means that
| your data could just as easily be skewed by a browser/OS
| update that rolls out to a ton of devices at once, as much
| as anything at your end.
|
| Do agree that the proliferation of acronyms doesn't help
| with wrapping your head around it all!
| kaycebasques wrote:
| > Maybe it's just their own connection that sucks?
|
| Your Core Web Vitals report in Search Console is based on
| Chrome User Experience Report data. Meaning that this is
| data from your real users, not Google running simulated
| tests of your pages on their own servers. I.e. when someone
| loads your page from Chrome, Chrome reports back how long
| it actually took the page to load for that user (it doesn't
| happen with all users, they have to meet various opt-in
| criteria [1]). So, if you see that 50% of pages are served
| too slowly on computers, it means that 50% of your real
| users actually experienced slow page loads (as measured by
| the Web Vitals metrics). Perhaps your static site isn't as
| efficient as you think, or your server is slow, or the
| devices/connection of your users is much worse than you
| assumed. That's the power of this data; it shows you that
| in the real-world the experience isn't as great as you're
| assuming and encourages you to investigate further.
|
| (For the record) The landing page of the Core Web Vitals
| report does indicate where the data is coming from. Next to
| "Source: Chrome UX report" you see a question mark. If you
| hover over that question mark then click the "Learn more"
| link it takes you to this page: https://support.google.com/
| webmasters/answer/9205520?ref_top...
|
| Disclosure: Googler working on https://web.dev. I'm not on
| the Web Vitals team but interact with them.
|
| [1] https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-user-
| experien...
| mumblemumble wrote:
| It's how the combination of the three encourages you to do
| things if you want to have a site with rich content. You're
| supposed to paint the page ASAP, so you don't want to defer
| loading any large content, but then you're not supposed to
| have the page layout shift around at all as you dynamically
| load all that content later, so you've got to do clever
| things with placeholders and swapping out content and
| whatnot. You've got up to 4 seconds to load all that stuff,
| which is enough to load an enormous amount of data over a
| fast internet connection, so much so that the same amount
| of content might take minutes to load over a slower
| connection. Fortunately, they've chosen methods for
| measuring that metric that are heavily biased toward
| measuring the experience of people who have 24/7 access to
| broadband.
|
| So, yeah, Google may want to encourage a nice Web
| experience, but they don't want to back this with metrics
| that might discourage people from sending too much business
| in AdSense's direction, or fail to favor Chrome over
| alternative browsers.
| mtgx wrote:
| Were they?
|
| It seems that Google's Pagespeed Insights, which is the basis
| for Core Web Vitals, by default considers content paint
| performance to be (a very arbitrary) 4x slower on mobile than
| on desktop.
|
| https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/spee...
|
| That to me seems like a pretty naked attempt to get everyone to
| "just use AMP for mobile."
| ProAm wrote:
| It's not Googles job to push 'industry wide-best practices' to
| third parties.
| _jal wrote:
| It is their job to turn their power in to money, and AMP is
| just a power play. It is what tech companies do - if we don't
| like it, something about the fundamentals has to change.
|
| My only complaint is the smirky, chipper PR front they
| package with it. Microsoft, at least, wasn't too insecure to
| show some fang without the Candyland faux-earnest horse shit
| when they were king.
| oblio wrote:
| It looks like it's no one's job, though. And the incentives
| for those third parties are even worse aligned with user
| interests, in many cases, than Google's incentives.
|
| And I say this as someone that thinks that Google is the
| scariest company out there, right now.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's not Googles job to push 'industry wide-best practices'
| to third parties.
|
| It's absolutely Google's job to decide what quality signals
| to incorporate into their search rankings.
| ProAm wrote:
| Id argue its their job to index the internet, not dictate
| how people build their webpages to determine the order they
| are displayed. They want their crawler to be faster and to
| capture market share/screen time.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| When Microsoft was the dominant OS, they enabled ever-
| harder-to-ignore auto updates because without them,
| deployments of their OS could be used to harm other
| people's systems through remote attack exploits.
|
| Google is also at a scale where they can improve the
| quality of everyone's web experience with their scale.
| It' not so much "their job" as "their obligation."
| ProAm wrote:
| I completely disagree. Its my website, my servers, my
| bandwidth I pay for. Google has zero obligation to
| dictate how others go about creating their own product.
| They can enforce web standards sure, but AMP is horrific,
| and Im sure they next-gen AMP will also be counter
| productive to third parties.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| By that reasoning: it's their search engine, their
| crawlers, their business to route people to the websites
| likeliest to be useful to those users.
|
| In that sense, their approach is in some way more
| equitable than Microsoft's: they're not forcing change
| upon your system by way of mandatory updates, they're
| simply saying that if you don't play the same game they
| play, they're unwilling to do business with you.
|
| If you're free to maintain your server to your standards,
| why should they not be free to maintain their search
| service to their standards?
| overboard2 wrote:
| Microsoft enabled harder to ignore auto updates because
| users didn't want to update. If a user doesn't want to
| update, they shouldn't have to, as it's their computer.
| It's not their OS being used to harm users, it's users
| making their own decisions and accepting the associated
| consequences. Google should not be trying to force people
| to obey web standards, they should try to let users make
| their own decisions.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > If a user doesn't want to update, they shouldn't have
| to, as it's their computer.
|
| And then they plug that computer into a global multi-user
| network and their machine is botnetted and used to harm
| other users. In that context, people are no longer making
| simple decisions and accepting the consequences; a
| tragedy of the commons is instead created.
|
| Your thinking works when computers are isolated from each
| other. When they're not, it's in the same category as
| "states require annual vehicle inspections." Because when
| you're sharing the road with other drivers, you owe it to
| them that your vehicle is unlikely to undergo
| catastrophic rapid disassembly.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Right, but when I search "cookie recipe", there are
| millions of pages that match in the index. Yes,
| popularity is a good starting point, but even that has
| its limits. All things equal, I'd much rather have a page
| that loads in 1s than one that loads in 10.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I'd also much rather have a page that brings me to a
| cookie recipe when I search "cookie recipe", but Google
| ranks pages with tons extraneous text, images and ads
| above your bare bones recipe site. This has given rise to
| an immense amount of blog spam on Google, where you have
| to scroll through paragraphs and paragraphs of inane
| content created by an army of underpaid writers just to
| get to the relevant information you searched for.
| ehsankia wrote:
| I'd honestly be curious to see a screenshot of your
| search result for "cookie recipe" because that's
| definitely not my experience.
| caw wrote:
| My top result is a blog format recipe -- recipe at end of
| page, though this one has a "jump to" button.
|
| https://joyfoodsunshine.com/the-most-amazing-chocolate-
| chip-...
|
| The second recipe result is Betty Crocker and as you'd
| expect -- recipe at top, steps with photos after.
|
| I personally find more of the former than the latter when
| looking for specific recipes (Red wine chocolate cake was
| my most recent search)
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| It's not their job, but it's certainly in their interest
| (since it gives their users a better experience), and it's
| not illegal, so it's understandable that they do.
| Spivak wrote:
| True but it is in their interest. Google benefits when the
| web is fast and full of content that can be indexed and worth
| surfacing.
| untog wrote:
| It sounds like AMP will stick around, serving as the easiest
| way to guarantee a great Core Vitals score (because it's so
| locked down), but that you're welcome to find other ways to get
| a great score yourself. Which is how it should have always
| been.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Is showing full screen images on desktop an industry-wide best
| practice? How about the faux navigation bars meant to resemble
| browser chrome?
|
| This "Google was just forcing publishers to fix their pages"
| meme desperately needs to die. Just consider all the extra
| standards crap they were pushing to introduce to perfect the
| deception. This was, as always, about owning the data.
| s17n wrote:
| Except... they didn't own the data? AMP was conceived because
| Google was worried about everything moving into Facebook's
| walled garden. That's what it was competing against.
|
| Google doesn't need to own the data because Google is the
| world's gateway to the open web. They don't care who owns the
| data as long as they can crawl it.
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| Great news, I'm working on a personal project and this weekend I
| was scheduled to implement the AMP version. I'll put the time
| into the "normal" site optimisation rather
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This is a shame for instances of Discourse that have valuable
| content. Discourse page loading time (at least for first load)
| are absolutely horrible, and I doubt that it's easy to fix them.
| This move, IIUC, will downgrade the page rank of forums that
| might be packed with useful, high quality information.
|
| Or maybe it will add sufficient encouragement that Discourse gets
| faster :)
| tester34 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Accelerator
| CivBase wrote:
| Thank you. I'm fine with AMP being offered as an optional
| framework on developers can build fast web pages. I'm _not_ okay
| with Google giving preferential search treatment to pages built
| using their own technology.
|
| If Google wants to prioritize fast pages, that's cool. AMP can be
| useful tool for making fast pages. But AMP is not necessary to
| make a fast page.
| xwdv wrote:
| Don't thank them just yet, there will be a catch.
| segmondy wrote:
| They are just playing defense since the govt is coming after
| them for being a monopoly and abusing their power and position.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| FWIW they announced their intention to do this over two years
| ago now, in March 2018:
|
| > Based on what we learned from AMP, we now feel ready to
| take the next step and work to support more instant-loading
| content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search
| designed for this, like the Top Stories carousel. This
| content will need to follow a set of future web standards and
| meet a set of objective performance and user experience
| criteria to be eligible.
|
| Source:
| https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/standardizing-
| lesso...
| square90 wrote:
| Yup, I agree. Some folks have got pretty good light, fast pages
| for example, http://lite.cnn.com/ is one of my favorites.
| usr1106 wrote:
| make that https://lite.cnn.com , please :)
| tomhallett wrote:
| There are 4 levels to how Google _could_ give preferential
| treatment:
|
| * To pages which are fast. This is based on measurement of a
| specified benchmark, regardless of the implementation used to
| achieve those results.
|
| * To pages which meet an AMP specification (do this, don't do
| this, etc) and are validated to conform to the spec. Publishers
| can bring their own hardware (CDN/Servers) and their own code
| (serverside language, javascript framework) to do it. Google's
| AMP servers as the defacto/reference implementation, but
| publishers/competitors are free to deviate from it. (Look at
| prebid.js as an example).
|
| * To pages which use the AMP Framework code as-is (serverside
| and clientside) provided by the Google Team, but you can bring
| your own hardware or have to use a set of accredited hosting
| providers.
|
| * To pages which use AMP and are hosted by Google.
|
| Obviously the last one is the "simplest" in regards to getting
| it off the ground, but AMP has been around long enough and
| Google has enough resources that they could definitely do one
| of the other options which go much more to the open web.
|
| Note: if you first thought says "verification of any of these
| things is way too hard and it's so subjective, so we shouldn't
| even try", then I'd recommend looking at Google's policies for
| when you can use their "skippable ads" (TrueView) on your video
| player. It's very manual and up to a lot of human
| interpretation when you get into the weeds:
| https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/3522024?hl=en#tr...
|
| Or if you think "maintaining a list of approved vendors is too
| hard of a problem", look at their list of approved vendors for
| Advertising: https://developers.google.com/third-party-
| ads/googleads-vend...
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Even better: Indicate page speed in the search results and
| adopt the users' preference. I know I would prefer to click
| fast sites.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| That would be visual noise, there's more useful information
| to show if you want to increase visual overhead, such as
| the WOT extension icons
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Well I very strongly disagree that it would be visual
| noise. For me the priorities are:
|
| 1. website name so I can recongize it
|
| 2. page speed
|
| 3. page date
|
| ....
|
| 476. excerpt from the page text.
|
| I consider the excerpt to be useless visual noise almost
| always, the page speed would be much more useful for me.
| Kalium wrote:
| > * To pages which are fast. This is based on measurement of
| a specified benchmark, regardless of the implementation used
| to achieve those results.
|
| I believe they've been doing this for quite some time. It
| hasn't been great for convincing people to keep their pages
| fast, though.
| fooey wrote:
| _Requiring_ any arbitrary metric or technology stack to be
| allowed at the top of the google search result is utterly
| antithetical to the idea of a search engine providing the
| "best" result for a search.
|
| Having a faster site than a competitor should be a boost, but
| if their content is better, they should win the better
| ranking.
|
| Google requiring Google's own technology is pretty blatant
| abuse everyone can understand.
| tomhallett wrote:
| There are a few different concepts going on here:
|
| 1) Which metrics get used in the algorithm? My list was
| tightly scoped to a process/ecosystem about tracking the
| metric of page speed.
|
| 2) How is that metric used in the algorithm? Boosting in
| the score in general? Is the top carousel treated
| differently?
|
| 3) It's also possible the application of the metric can
| change what is required from that metric. For example:
| Google regular results require one page speed option, but
| Google mobile carousel requires a more stringent page speed
| option.
|
| Personally, I am fine with page speed being used as a
| metric in search results. Context: The main usecase for
| AMP, and the publishers who support it, are related to news
| (versus stack overflow, etc). So there is a lot of room for
| "kim kardashian birthday party" to have very similar
| content where page speed is a great metric to optimize
| between them.
|
| I am less fine with Google requiring their hosted version
| of it - especially in the medium/long term once the project
| has gotten over its experimental phase and proven market
| adoption.
| s17n wrote:
| > But AMP is not necessary to make a fast page.
|
| That's true, but almost no non-AMP news sites aren't total
| garbage (and some of them have even manage to make their AMP
| sites terrible). Without Google taking an aggressive approach,
| things will get worse, not better.
| ballenf wrote:
| I don't think anyone (here) would complain if Google
| explicitly used Lighthouse scores in ranking algorithms. Or
| any similar agnostic user experience ranking.
| s17n wrote:
| "We need to make an AMP site to get into this carousel" is
| a much easier sell (to executives) than "we need to rebuild
| our site according to some not completely specified
| principles to hopefully get a higher search rank".
| stephenr wrote:
| It really can't be hard to set a metric.
|
| Time limit (load time and render time), and to a lesser
| degree, weight limit (ie total resources size).
|
| This is hardly a new concept.
| josephg wrote:
| Yeah; and the spectre of page weight might be a good
| motivating factor.
|
| "Each useless tracker we add lowers our search rank. Are
| we sure we need to add this one?"
| underwater wrote:
| When I worked as a publisher AMP pages were slower to render
| than our web pages, though faster with the head start Google
| gives them.
|
| Google could introduce rewards for fast web pages too, but
| chose not to.
| tssva wrote:
| Going to be an unpopular opinion here but as an end user I am
| disappointed to hear this because AMP was a great improvement to
| the performance of my mobile browsing experience. I understand
| that AMP isn't required for a great performing mobile site but
| before AMP no one seemed to take the steps to deliver one without
| it.
| ehsankia wrote:
| If a site is able to reach the same performance without AMP
| (which is certainly possible), then I don't see what the issue
| is. At the end of the day we want fast pages. AMP with the
| incentives was a good way to force sites to be faster, but if
| they want to achieve it their own way, I don't see an issue
| either. As long as the overall bar is not lowered.
| toast0 wrote:
| AMP was one of the things that pushed me off Google search and
| off Google Chrome on Android. The experience was mostly worse;
| especially reddit AMP is really awful, even given how awful
| non-AMP reddit is.
|
| The few things that bothered me the worst were, blank white
| pages while loading, to earn the 'one contentful paint'; fonts
| loading late; and it's difficult to share links, because they
| had the garbage urls because google was proxying. The fake
| address bar was the icing on the cake.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Reddit AMP flat out doesn't scroll on my phone. The whole
| page is actually totally broken.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| There are plenty of major sites where AMP is flat out worse,
| even beside the inherent clumsiness of AMP caches. Reddit and
| The Guardian spring to mind.
| lxgr wrote:
| Interesting - my own AMP experience has been one of ugly and/or
| functionally broken sites.
|
| Maybe this is platform dependent? I'm using iOS.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| It's definitely no better on Android.
| tssva wrote:
| My experience is with Chrome and the chromium based Microsoft
| Edge on Android. Of course ugly is also in the eye of the
| beholder.
| gowld wrote:
| The point of this change is that it now allows _more_ high-
| performance sites into Google Search, by allowing both AMP and
| non-AMP sites that are high-performance. It 's good news.
|
| Nothing here makes AMP less able to deliver high-performance
| pages.
| whatatita wrote:
| I have to, begrudgingly, agree to that point. Most major news
| sites are barely usable without multiple content filters (ad
| blockers, etc.). AMP really pushed them into making things load
| quicker and with less weight.
| [deleted]
| micropoet wrote:
| Senators treated them well.
| usr1106 wrote:
| I don't see any mentioning that AMP is nowadays under the
| umbrella of the Linux foundation.
|
| If it were just a vendor neutral technology that would probably
| OK. But with Google's dominance on the hosting side, that's not
| very good. Well, probably Google is one of the bigger funders of
| the Linux Foundation, so money goes over worries about anti-
| competitive behaviour.
| solinent wrote:
| I honestly see a successful AMP as the end of the web as we know
| it--there's no way for us to know if the content isn't censored
| by Google. I'm certain their plan is to sell their hosting
| service and show providers that they could use Google services.
| What's the logical next step?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I honestly see a successful AMP as the end of the web as we
| know it--there's no way for us to know if the content isn't
| censored by Google.
|
| Is there any way to tell.that the content of an HTML page isn't
| censored by the hosting provider used by the page owner, or by
| the browser vendor?
|
| Doesn't seem AMP adds anything to that. Sure, you can't know,
| in theory, that the host (which may not be Google, Microsoft
| and others run AMP hosts) has censored it, but what does that
| actually change vs. HTML?
| solinent wrote:
| Whoever owns the server can serve you whatever content the
| want. They can change it even, depending on the user.
| mybrid wrote:
| Ouch! My eyes! What is up with the Mark Up web site? They
| seriously need to hire the Norman Nielson Group to give them
| usability feedback.
| cblackthornekc wrote:
| I know that AMP isn't going away, but man I won't miss it.
| Android and AMP just never seem to get along. The number of times
| I've clicked a link to watch some video that won't load because
| of AMP is too high.
| moron4hire wrote:
| > page experience... [a measure of] how users perceive the
| experience of interacting with a web page
|
| You sure it's not how _Larry Page_ perceives the experience?
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| I hate AMP so much, breaks my browsing all the time.
| wayneftw wrote:
| I switched to the desktop view permanently for google.com on my
| phone. I haven't seen an AMP page since.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I've heard other people had this issue, but I've never seen it
| and I'm curious what causes it.
| ce4 wrote:
| I was in the same boat until i switched to Firefox (even
| mobile) and installed the "redirect amp to html" addon.
|
| This has silenced my AMP anger.
|
| Edit: and switching from Google Search to DuckDuckGo. The addon
| only needs to take care of amp links i get sent via
| messenger/mail/etc
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| On the one hand, the addon has relieved my AMP issues; I no
| longer have any issues using AMP links that get sent to me.
| On the other hand, this solves the problem for me but not
| others, and I'm less likely to notice the problem and reply
| all or leave a comment with the non-AMP link.
|
| Also, it's available from the same developer as an addon for
| Chrome desktop; I suppose if you were just annoyed by the
| experience and don't care about de-Googling it works there
| too.
| ce4 wrote:
| There's only so much one can do. At work I had to even
| implement AMP at the request of an upper level, requested
| by marketing or the seo team. Everyone hated it but I can
| totally understand it: it made total business sense to
| appear in the Google rolodex search result
| vaccinator wrote:
| That doesn't work too well with Firefox for Android, because
| Mozilla disabled most addons (there's like only 11 addons
| that are approved). I think it is possible to enable them in
| Firefox for Android Nightly[1] by creating an "add-on
| collection", which is kind of a pain and the first extension
| that I tried doesn't appear to work correctly (Redirector)
| and the browser just crashed after disabling the addon.
|
| Another way would be to stick with Fennec v68 from fdroid,
| but that is not such a great idea, but at least the
| extensions do work.
|
| 1. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-
| extensio...
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| Kiwi Browser is the way to go since Mozilla decided that it
| knows better than it's users which addons should they be
| able to use or not. It's basically Chromium with all it's
| addons available.
| vaccinator wrote:
| It probably calls home to Google, also.
| ce4 wrote:
| You're right, thats why i switched to an older version of
| Firefox' Fennec fork on F-Droid. Mozilla should really fix
| this
| rapnie wrote:
| Oh nice, I might try that out. The new FF Android has
| been such a bad experience for me from the start, and has
| a long way to go to catch up with the old version, imho.
| vaccinator wrote:
| I could not stick with the new Firefox for Android for
| more than 1 day... they didn't even implement something
| as simple as keyboard shortcuts (I understand that they
| have their priorities, but there are so many reasons why
| Fennix is worst then the previous engine Fennec, not sure
| why it was released in Alpha state as a finished product
| (did Google pay them to do this, IE: if you cripple your
| browser, I'll buy you a yacht)).
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| having to do work to protect myself against bad things still
| makes me mad, because of the hating to do work thing.
| ce4 wrote:
| Sure I also still hate AMP but it doesnt constantly trigger
| the daily anger like it used to anymore
| madoublet wrote:
| Google search is broken and it has fundamentally broken the web.
| Every search now is just pages and pages of content farms. If I
| can tell a content farm within a few seconds of loading a page,
| surely Google can as well. So, unless this new "page experience
| ranking" blocks content farms, then I am not sure how it will be
| better for end users.
| dazc wrote:
| The problem being there is no incentive to be not a content
| farm.
|
| Few people are going to spend their time giving away knowledge
| for free.
|
| I am not defending Google, just being pragmatic.
| Method-X wrote:
| Can you give me an example of a search that produces content
| farm results? I mainly search for technical docs and such so
| perhaps I'm not seeing it as much because of that.
| madoublet wrote:
| Technical docs seem to be pretty safe for now. But, any
| popular search produces a lot of web farms: recipes, how-to
| articles, best of, etc.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Why does google have to explicitly block these sites? No
| doubt all those garbage, ad-strewn recipe sites rank low on
| user experience metrics. So if there were a better recipe
| site out there, Google would show it to you. It seems they
| (recipe sites) are simply having a hard time monetizing
| without being uber annoying.
| vaccinator wrote:
| Mozilla should ask money from google for not automatically
| redirecting AMP URLs to original URLs.
| varispeed wrote:
| Basically it's a way for Google to remove Ad revenue from the
| outlets that don't use AdSense. Pretty clever strategy, but
| extremely abusive. I hope Google gets a proper fine (in order of
| billions), it will be ordered to split into separate independent
| companies and will have to delete all personal data they don't
| have legitimate reason to have.
| martin-adams wrote:
| The thing that frustrated me most from an e-commerce perspective,
| is that Google were pushing AMP shopping experiences and claiming
| improved user experience, but provided no data to support this.
| vanadium wrote:
| They made a full-court press in the SEM environment as well,
| especially for lead-gen/landing pages. Otherwise, same song and
| dance.
| arusahni wrote:
| If AMP becomes irrelevant, does this end the war against URLs?
| Or, with Google owning the most popular browser, does this not
| matter?
| Spivak wrote:
| Probably doesn't matter since the war on urls is mostly a myth
| perpetuated by outrage-bait blogspam.
|
| By default (i.e. until you click the bar) only showing the part
| of the URL that the site doesn't control is really good for
| security and avoiding phishing. Now
| apple.paypal.secure.wendys.scamsite.info/payus/wwwcitibank just
| shows scamsite.info. This is a good thing! And doubly because
| URL paths and fragments have been made largely irrelevant to
| end users as app routes.
|
| If you're going to rant about the death of the URL you should
| complain to HN as well that only shows the domain next to
| posts.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Your point about domains and phishing may have some merit.
| But I strongly object to the idea in your last sentence:
|
| >"URL paths and fragments have been made largely irrelevant
| to end users as app routes"
|
| No. Some SPA scenarios, for some end users != "largely
| irrelevant".
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean it's literally one click away. Let me tell you how
| relevant
| /reply?id=25150055&goto=threads%3Fid%3DSpivak%2325150055 is
| to me on this page. If it was id=25151055 I would be
| worried.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Why not just bold that part and leave the rest?
| Spivak wrote:
| If we're at the point where we're de-emphasizing something
| because it's almost always visual noise and you don't need
| to see it often why is "hide it until the bar is selected"
| worse?
| zbrozek wrote:
| I work at an Alphabet company, so at work I use Chrome.
| Lots of internal tools are really buggy on anything but
| Chrome, so I have little choice. There's lots of copy-
| paste of URLs, including fragments, and it's really
| jarring to have the text suddenly change right after a
| mouse-up. It's surprising and unpleasant. And of course
| the browser tries to modify the selection between mouse-
| up and copy to make sure I get the whole thing, so now
| the software is not doing what I told it to.
|
| It seems harmless to show the full URL and not bait-and-
| switch the text upon interaction. I don't see it as the
| browser's job to protect users from their incompetence.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| Chrome already visually de-emphasizes the URL path,
| clearly they don't think it's enough.
|
| If you care at all about the health of the web, you
| should support browsers in protecting users from their
| own incompetence. Users don't blame themselves for
| phishing & fraud, when it runs rampant on a platform they
| simply switch and the end result is that native walled
| gardens that do protect users win over the web. This is
| exactly what happened with news on the mobile web; mobile
| news websites got so slow that Apple & Facebook started
| gaining a lot of ground with completely closed &
| proprietary news platforms (Apple News, Facebook
| Instant), until Google released AMP which both helped &
| pressured news orgs to get their shit together on the
| web.
| wzdd wrote:
| The site controls all parts of the URL. Your example would
| much more likely show "paypal-accounts.info" or similar.
| Spivak wrote:
| True but users are way less likely to fall for that then
| the hack to push 'paypal.com' to the leftmost position in
| the bar.
| untog wrote:
| What does the "war against URLs" even mean? Sounds like it
| could be one of two things:
|
| 1. Chrome only showing the domain in the address bar
|
| No, I doubt it'll make any difference here. Google's reasons
| for doing that are anti-fraud, not anything to do with AMP. And
| (I'll give up shouting this into the void one day, I swear)
| Apple did this with Safari years ago and no-one cared. It's
| outrage for outrage's sake.
|
| 2. The whole "web packaging" format issue
|
| Google proposed a standard that let you "fake" the URL of a
| page (albeit with cryptographic signing to ensure it actually
| came from the right host). This might be dead in the water,
| yes. Mozilla and Apple already came out against it, and one the
| primary use cases was AMP. I doubt Google will un-implement it
| any time too soon, but I think it'll end up being a weird edge
| thing that very few people care about or use.
| lxgr wrote:
| Awesome, that's the one tombstone on https://killedbygoogle.com/
| I've been waiting for.
| smt88 wrote:
| Absolutely not. AMP is still around and already integrated
| deeply into thousands of high-traffic sites.
|
| Google is probably just trying to reduce the likelihood of
| being broken up. AMP is widely adopted, so the damage of their
| preferential treatment has already been done.
| lxgr wrote:
| > AMP is widely adopted
|
| But isn't it also incredibly easy to switch off? At least I
| don't know any AMP-only website.
| smt88 wrote:
| A lot of news aggregators and RSS feeds will default to the
| AMP URL. People post and send AMP URLs all the time. You
| can see it more and more on reddit lately.
| gruturo wrote:
| How do we help it die then, it's the most unwelcome,
| undesirable crap I've seen in years. Google used all its
| power to force it down everyone's throats, but it sucks so
| badly and nobody wants it.
|
| Not publishers, who recognize it for what it is (a very, very
| thinly veiled attempt at stealing users, traffic and
| analytics, and Google building its own walled garden).
|
| Not users, for whom navigation is broken, links and scrolling
| behave weirdly or break completely, and the address bar can't
| be trusted any more.
| tantalor wrote:
| > How do we help it die
|
| Competition. Replace it with something better using
| https://web.dev/vitals/
| admax88q wrote:
| Did the URL get changed? Why is everyone talking about AMP?
|
| EDIT: Now the link has been changed back so this comment makes me
| look stupid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151764
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| Because the article is (partly) about AMP.
| 5h wrote:
| 'No Intrusive interstitials' - I hope this factor carries
| increasing weight, many websites are pretty horrible experiences
| on first visit nowdays.
| mcrider wrote:
| Yes this is more interesting to me than AMP being demoted (I
| usually automatically ignore AMP anyway as they have that
| 'seems like an ad' feel that my subconscious automatically
| bypasses). The interstitials/popups to e.g. sign up for a
| mailing list that appear on so many sites these days are so
| much more annoying as I have to hunt for the close button every
| time.
| tyingq wrote:
| Guessing this will start a talent drain on the AMP team, and
| eventually kill it off.
| tbodt wrote:
| You'll never guess whose idea this was
| codazoda wrote:
| An aside...
|
| Google is terrible at documentation. After reading the first few
| paragraphs, I have no idea what they're talking about. It's full
| of unexplained buzz words I've never heard before.
|
| The first thing that comes to mind for me is a phrase my old boss
| used to say, "there's money in confusion".
| meibo wrote:
| Not sure what your background is, but if you work in SEO or do
| web optimization in general, this article really isn't that bad
| to get the gist of.
|
| Maybe it's more of a target group thing? This isn't really a
| "everyone needs to know" situation, it addresses the people
| that need to know and expects a certain pre-existing knowledge
| of the topic.
| dang wrote:
| I imagine this comment was about
| https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-
| for..., which the URL above was changed to for a while.
| Explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151764
| EGreg wrote:
| Just the other day, I saw almost _everything_ I searched on
| Google being AMP, and sharing was broken. I had to find and click
| the little share icon by scrolling up and having it appear.
| Terrible for most users who won 't discover it!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-11-19 23:01 UTC)